As I have discussing in this blog, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is ramping up it worksite enforcement activities. Recently, after ICE issued a Notice of Inspection (NOI) and Notice of Suspect Documents to an unnamed staffing company for Cloverhill Bakery of Chicago, Illinois, approximately 800 employees were terminated or quit due to being undocumented workers.

Cloverhill Bakery, a part of the Swiss-based international company, Aryzta AG, lost about 35% of its workforce due to the staffing company’s employees being undocumented. As one can imagine, losing 35% of your workforce has made it difficult to meet production of products for its customers, fast-food chains and supermarkets.

Although press reports referred to ICE’s action as a raid, it was not such; rather it was an inspection of the staffing company’s employees’ I-9 forms. The inspection of the I-9 forms is accomplished by the delivery of a NOI/subpoena by ICE agents.

The NOI was issued earlier in 2017 and caused one of the largest groups of employees to lose their jobs due to lack of work authorization in 2017. Since the NOI occurred earlier this year, ICE did not take any actions to detain the 800 undocumented workers. Recently, ICE announced that it planned to detain undocumented workers found at employers’ facilities.

If you are worried that your company is going to be the next ICE target, I recommend you get prepared now. The best way is to have an immigration attorney, well-versed in I-9 forms and worksite enforcement, conduct an internal I-9 audit. Alternatively, if you want to get a better understanding of immigration compliance for employers, I recommend you read my new book, The I-9 and E-Verify Handbook, which is available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0997083379.